


Things The Internet Told Me

by closetplayground



Category: Agents of Cracked
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-29
Updated: 2011-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-15 04:46:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetplayground/pseuds/closetplayground
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just another day at the office.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things The Internet Told Me

        There really was something incredibly serene and calming about seeing the overhead lights flicker on for the first time in the morning as you walked down the empty hall to your cubicle. The office in the morning, before the deadlines and the mockery and the Chief, and before Michael, arrived, was a simpler place. Dan sank into the familiar almost-comfort of his desk chair and switched on his computer, greeting the horses, individually, by name (and, where it applied, rank), that were littered about his desk as the desktop struggled to boot up. The monitor flickered on, gasped for life, and fell dead, flashing an error message before shutting back off. Dan sighed; his idiot savant of a partner had likely poured soda into it again, or worse, had yet again managed to dissemble the entire hard drive and replace the inner workings of the computer with the slightly mutilated and melting bodies of several of Dan’s horses. Then again, Michael, like lightening, rarely struck the same spot twice. Although in reality, lightening was more likely to strike somewhere it had already struck, which had actually been one of the items in an article Dan had written a week prior, but that wasn‘t the point; Swaim was not lightening, he was Swaim. And besides, once was plenty enough for that particular brand of cruelty.  
        Pushing up his shirt sleeves, Dan gave the computer a light, if deliberate, kick, and hit the power button again. Thankfully, nothing catastrophic appeared to be wrong with the machine, and within a few minutes, the familiar face of his desktop smiling back at him. Well, not literally, because that would be kind of terrifying. Seriously, what kind of psychopath sets a massive, smiling face as their desktop? Dan shook the thought from his head and opened the article he was supposed to be working on for that morning, which was supposed to be an interview with God. Well, if by interview you meant a two-sided piece written by Dan pretending to be Michael, who’s assignment the article actually was, but who had, predictably, found some way to convince Dan to do it for him whilst he slept in, and by God you meant Michael (actually Dan) pretending to be Morgan Freeman and talking to himself in the form of a scripted dialogue.

       Dissected to it’s base elements, Dan’s job shouldn’t have been particularly difficult: it was the little things Michael did, like this, that made it not only that, but also, occasionally, life threatening. Nevertheless, it was still better than writing a column in a paper (like they’d hire him), or pumping gas (again with the not hiring him). Dan tried not to consider the fact that his position with Cracked was, in a way, a dead end in more ways than one, both in that it nullified all of his previous qualifications (very few, all rather stuffy and bookish in nature, certainly lacking in proper preparation concerning terrorist attacks, including those in which you were the terrorist, high power explosives, etc), and in the way that he’d completely lost count of the number of jobs that had, somewhat inexplicably, almost ended Dan’s workload, so to speak, permanently.  
      
         Slowly, a sea of coworkers started to ebb into their offices. Dan paused, cleaning his glasses with practiced finesse. It was way too early in the morning for this, not to mention that there was a piece of toast in his disk drive, which made it difficult to play any of the DVDs he’d been planning to get at for inspiration. He considered giving up for the time being and just going to get some coffee, maybe with a little bit of vodka in it, you know, as a wake up call, but decided against it. The more time he wasted now, the less he would have later, and later had Michael, who was generally directly proportionate to the amount of work accomplished in the same way a black hole was to everything around it. Maybe just the vodka then; coffee took too long.  
      
         Dan immersed himself in his spinny chair, nestling into it with the same sort of feeling that a game cartridge might associate with being placed into its intended console - a feeling of comfortable rightness tainted ever so slightly with the knowledge that, very soon, you were likely to get heated up by the surrounded electrical circuits, possibly to the point of system failure, but that, in the mean time, you would fulfil the purpose for which you had been designed. Well, alright, so it wasn’t a perfect metaphor, but all the same, although Dan often fantasized about what life would be like had he ever listened to any of his teachers (they were not, of course, talking to him, but to the promising students in his classes. Regardless, one can learn a lot by taking advice intended for other people), and he’d become successful, when it came right down to it, he couldn’t really imagine leaving. Once you were part of Cracked, so it seemed, you couldn’t really leave. It was just once of those things.  
         In any case, Dan was in the spinny chair, and the horses were all accounted for, and Michael’s article was half written already, and he had a full bottle of Grey Goose, and Michael was late for work. All in all, the morning was a pleasant one, and Dan allowed himself a little bit of a smile and a stretch, dropping a spot of the tension he constantly carried in his shoulders (Michael refused to carry his own load, so Dan tended to walk around with a double load of it, in addition to taking on most of Michael’s guilt, shame, and other usual human emotions - it got rather harsh on the back after a while). It was the brief sigh of relief that really blew it.  
         Up until a certain point, the universe will let you get away with things, things like wearing mismatched socks when the match is nearby, or students in culinary school making themselves ramen between classes, or quietly disposing of the bodies of unpleasant neighbours in locations the local authorities will be unlikely to discover them, but these things do pile up, and after you’ve run up a bit of a tab, the universe hands over your bill. This, Dan figured, is what happened at the moment of his sighing. The universe had been okay with the relief, the smile, the stretching, and the general state of comfort until the sigh, at which point it had realized something was amiss, or otherwise Not as it Usually Was in the life of Dan O’Brien, and, feeling somewhat ashamed of not keeping things consistent, attempted to fix it.  
         From across the room, a cubicle collapsed. The sigh Dan had been indulging in shifted midway from contentment to that emotion we don’t really have a word for, the one you feel when you find you’ve won the lotto only to discover you’ve won the price of the tickets you purchased back and nothing more, or when your sister enthuses over her new boyfriend as you can only anticipate her soggy, anguished return a few weeks later to announce the inevitable break up. It is a feeling, beyond everything, of total desolation and loss, only not quite that depressing, really. You know, with this many words, you’d think English would have the right ones all figured out by now; whoever’s in control of this language ought to be fired.

 

\---

 

         “…and people on the internet said that homemade high power explosives could be dangerous, so I thought, well people on the internet were wrong about other things, so why not this one!”  
         Dan removed his glasses again, cleaning them for the third time already that morning, and set them back on his face. “Again, Michael, what was it again we discussed with the doing things because people on the internet said anything?”  
         For a moment, it seemed as if Michael was going to respond with a good ‘not to’, or ‘they are a hive mind, we don’t listen to them, or, ‘we don’t trust the assholes who use multiple X’s in any part of their usernames’, or any of the other lessons he’d carefully not learned over his lifetime, but instead, his face lit up with that manic expression that always suggested something violent of illegal was at hand. “Like anyone remembers anything we discuss, Dan. I certainly don’t! I don’t remember what I just said a few seconds ago!” The grin was getting larger. “What did I just say, Dan?” he asked.  
        “Like anyone rememb -”  
         “See, what I don’t get is why you feel the need to repeat me when I say that,” Michael interrupted.  
        Dan resisted the urge to clean his glasses again, having set in place a firm rule several months ago that glasses cleaning was strictly limited to once every three minutes. “Michael, you asked me what you just said, so I was repeating it.”  
         “What, Dan?”  
         “You asked me what - oh forget it. I’m not bothering with this again. I have your article to write, Michael. Go sit down, and play Duck Hunt or something, and, just, try not to destroy the planet.” Dan turned towards his desk, only to find himself inexplicably facing Michael again.  
        “Como, Dan?” he demanded in an identical tone, one Dan had previously associated with schoolchildren of the kindergarten variety, who, beside Michael, actually seemed both tame, and very mature.  
         “That’s the same question, only Spanish,” Dan deadpanned, adding a few lines of Morgan Freeman to Michael’s article.  
         “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, Daniel?”  
         Dan nearly choked on his vodka. “You have absolutely no idea what you just said, do you?”  
         “The real question is, do you? They’re French questions, Dan,” Michael insisted, “it’s like English questions, but they’re in French.”  
         “Truly amazing how that happens,” Dan muttered, choosing to address his horses rather than Michael, the somewhat depressing part of it being that they were, in all honestly, more likely to give a sane or logical response than Swaim was.  
         When Dan turned back after a moment of rare silence, Michael was sitting under his desk, carving a design into it with a small dagger. It looked both valuable and sharp, but Dan wasn’t going to complain until his partner turned the weapon on him. A quarter of an hour later, Dan had two complete articles of his own, and the one of Michael‘s, all edited and published, and Michael had a detailed desk carving of an unlikely pornographic outtake of the Matrix, rendered with all of the grace and skill of a Neanderthal in preschool.

         It was going to be a long day.  
     



End file.
